VMware Heart Beat: A Solution looking for a Problem?
VMware chose to lift the veil on certain features rolling out in vSphere, its next generation server, at the VMworld Europe conference in Cannes last month. Among the new features is Heart Beat 1.0, part of the high availability feature set for the management console.
VMware's Heart Beat raises a few questions. The absence of a heartbeat function has long been recognised as a weakness in VMware's offering – there was no protection for the server hosting the management console failed. With Heart Beat 1.0 the console (whether hosted on a virtual or physical server) can now be clustered via LAN or WAN to ensure high availability. With 90% of VMware deployments dependent on the management console, this is clearly a step forward. That said, VMware admits that the product wasn't developed in house; in fact, it's the result of an exclusive OEM agreement with Neverfail. Exclusive, in the sense that the agreement precludes Neverfail offering their solution independently of VMware. Reciprocally VMware will not promote or sign similar agreements with other vendors of heartbeat solutions such as Double-Take or Steel-Eye. None of which, of course, prevents the user from selecting an alternative solution for their own deployments…
Expensive – and Limited
…which is likely to be what many customers choose to do. Because though Heart Beat fills a feature gap in the VMware offering – with the advantage for the customer of not adding yet another supplier to the roster – it's one of the most expensive solutions on the market. In today's economic climate, price is (almost) everything. Heart Beat starts at $9995, compared to around $6000 for solutions from third parties such as Double-Take and Steel-Eye. And, the Neverfail solution is only supported in a limited range of environments. If you're running vCenter with an Oracle database, you'll have to look elsewhere for a high-availability solution.
In making this move, VMware is taking the risk of attacking its own partner ecosystem. You can see what they think of this move on Double-Take's blog here. The reality is that VMware isn’t going to put all of their eggs in one basket for virtualization protection just because of one OEM agreement. VMware will help position the solution that will sell the most ESXi licenses. This actually works to the advantage of Double-Take, because in addition to offering a more complete and cost-effective solution to for the protection of vCenter Double-Take Software offers customers a single source for virtual workload backups, physical or virtual workload migration for high availability or disaster recovery, and X2X migration of workloads to provision more virtual machines faster. In summary, according to the Double-Take blog, the Double-Take solution, leveraging Full-Server Failover, has significant benefits over the VMware/Neverfail OEM solution in that it’s (1) less expensive, (2) protects the entire system (OS, vCenter app, data, etc.) in real-time and (3) is easier to setup and manage.
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The 100% Virtual Datacenter is Coming!
VMware, EMC and Cisco used the VMworld Europe 2009 event in Cannes last month to point the spotlight on their joint R&D programs for the virtual environment. The objective is to achieve 100% virtualisation in the data center. Reaching this goal implies virtualising every layer in the infrastructure from network to applications, including virtualised storage. Chad Sakac, EMC Vice-President in charge of the VMware alliance, reckons current data center consolidation efforts will continue as enterprises seek to contain the cost of retaining and storing ever more data. You can listen to Chad's talk here (clic on image to launch video):
Scott Davis, Chief Datacenter Architect at VMware, showed delegates what the future datacenter platform will look like, with its infrastructure and application services. Scalable, secure, easy to manage virtual services will deliver the flexibility needed to support workload mobility reliably. How will we manage the migration to the virtual datacenter OS? What products and technologies does VMware have in the pipeline? Do we need to worry about performance impacts? Scott Davis explains everything in this video:
Ed Bugnion is Technical Director of Cisco's Virtualisation and Access Server Business Unit. He talked about the key benefits of full data center virtualisation. Very high availability, simplified cabling, unlimited scalability, and faster disaster recovery are just the beginning of the list. Follow his talk, based on real-world examples, here:
Chad Sakac, EMC VP, wound up the presentation with a series of case studies, integration plans and (virtual) demos. He delivers a convincing demonstrating of the advantages of full datacenter virtualisation, especially for the prevention of data loss. Click on this link for Chad's conclusions:
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